Death in the Woods and Other Stories: And Other Stories
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"Death in the Woods is a signal junction in Anderson's ...)
"Death in the Woods is a signal junction in Anderson's career and is to my mind one of the finest stories in our language." ―Jim Harrison
Still fresh and strikingly contemporary, the stark realism of these stories carefully explores the dreams and emotions of Sherwood Anderson's unforgettable characters. In Death in the Woods, we travel deep into the heart of America as Anderson saw it, to find an introspective man, in a desolate landscape, questioning the very meaning of his world.
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Dark Laughter, Sherwood Anderson's best selling novel, ...)
Dark Laughter, Sherwood Anderson's best selling novel, is influenced by Joyce's Ulysses. It deals with the new sexual freedom of the 1920s and provides a unique fictional window into that era.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (LOA #235): Winesburg, Ohio / The Triumph of the Egg / Horses and Men / Death in the Woods / uncollected stories (Library of America)
(In the winter of 1912, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) abru...)
In the winter of 1912, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) abruptly left his office and spent three days wandering through the Ohio countryside, a victim of “nervous exhaustion.” Over the next few years, abandoning his family and his business, he resolved to become a writer. Novels and poetry followed, but it was with the story collection Winesburg, Ohio that he found his ideal form, remaking the American short story for the modern era. Hart Crane, one of the first to recognize Anderson’s genius, quickly hailed his accomplishment: “America should read this book on her knees.” Here––for the first time in a single volume––are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes Charles Baxter, editor of this volume.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
(Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bi...)
Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bidwell, Ohio. He invents a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the burden of famers, but an investor in town exploits his product, which fails to succeed. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a millionaire and transforms Bidwell into a center of manufacturing. McVey, perennially lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends college at nearby Ohio State and is perennially harassed by her potential matches. Published one year after Winesburg, Ohio, in 1920, Poor White has a modernist style, an realist attention to every day life, and an eerily contemporary resonance.
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works.
Background
Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876 in Camden, Ohio, United States, the second son and third of seven children of Irwin McClain Anderson, a harnessmaker, and Emma Jane (Smith) Anderson. His middle name, which he never used, was Berton.
His paternal great-grandparents, probably Scotch-Irish, had migrated in 1807 from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, to a farm near West Union, Ohio, on which Anderson's grandfather and father grew up. His maternal grandmother had come to Ohio from Germany as a young girl.
Irwin Anderson, a Union veteran of the Civil War, was a restless extrovert who preferred telling war tales and drinking to steady work. Leaving Camden in 1877, he moved his family in succession to Independence (now Butler) and Caledonia, and in 1884 to Clyde, in north central Ohio, where he worked improvidently at his trade and then as a house painter; his wife took in washing to supplement the family income.
During his childhood in Clyde, Anderson unconsciously absorbed impressions of small-town life that subsequently provided him with fictional material. Known to the town as "Jobby" for his scurrying, enterprising ways, he felt keenly the stigma of being the son of "a well known no-account" and wanted desperately to make money, to become respectable; yet he had other periods of dreaminess and of concentrated but undirected reading.
He was later to believe that some of his storytelling gift came from his father, whom he disliked, but that his meek, hardworking mother, whom he loved, "first awoke in [him] the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives. " After her death, in 1895, the family began to break up.
Education
Sherwood was an average student and completed grammar school and nine months of high school.
In 1896 he went to Chicago, where he worked and studied arithmetic in night school.
He obtained a final year of schooling in 1899-1900 at Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio.
Then he went to study in Springfield. The lively intellectual community of the Springfield boardinghouse where he lived with his brother Karl and other artists, teachers, and writers probably aroused his interest in becoming a writer.
Career
Anderson worked in a Clyde bicycle factory and in 1896 went to Chicago, where he labored in a produce warehouse. During the Spanish-American War he joined the National Guard and was stationed for four months in Cuba.
For the time being, however, he was bent on business success, and in June 1900 he returned to Chicago and shortly became an expert copywriter with an advertising agency. His articles in two trade journals extolling the American businessman attracted much favorable attention.
In September 1906 he moved to Cleveland, where Anderson became president of United Factories, a mail-order firm. After financial reverses, they settled a year later in nearby Elyria, where he built up a mail-order paint business. Outwardly successful and conventional, Anderson inwardly became disturbed by the "slickness" of business practices, by developing tensions with his wife, and eventually by financial worries. He began writing fiction about 1909, partly as self-therapy, partly as a tentative career interest.
On November 28, 1912, overworked and under deep psychological stress, he walked out of his office in what he later claimed to be a conscious rejection of business; actually he had suffered a mental breakdown resulting in temporary amnesia.
Recovering, he left for Chicago in February 1913 and resumed his advertising work. Although he was to continue in advertising, off and on, until his final break in 1922, he resented his dependency on the world of business, which he later characterized as a universal network of prostitution. The literary and artistic excitement of the current "Chicago Renaissance" encouraged Anderson to continue writing.
Two apprentice-work novels composed in Elyria were published, the first through the efforts of Floyd Dell and Theodore Dreiser: Windy McPherson's Son (1916), the autobiographical story of a man's rise in and rejection of business, and Marching Men (1917), a labor novel. Mid-American Chants (1918) collected the free-verse poems he wrote after meeting the New York critics Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, and Paul Rosenfeld, who admired his work.
In 1919 the pioneering publisher B. W. Huebsch issued Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson's masterpiece. Attacked by some critics for "sordidness" and "preoccupation with sex, " these brooding Midwest tales, "plotless" but carefully formed, showed their author's sympathetic insight into the thwarted lives of ordinary people. Many of the small-town characters in this subtly organized work of art have been turned by psychic isolation into "grotesques"; yet it is largely from the grotesques themselves that George Willard, the youthful protagonist, learns self-understanding, emotional maturity, and the responsibilities of the writer.
During the 1920s Winesburg, Ohio was often considered representative of the contemporary "Revolt from the Village, " but it is now recognized as being instead a profound expression of human community and love.
Anderson, increasingly restive at having to support himself by advertising work, lived briefly in New York City in 1918 and, in 1920 (to escape the Chicago winter), in Fairhope, Alabama. In these places he wrote his best novel, Poor White (1920), a picture of the destruction of an Ohio town's sense of community by industrialism. Creatively, the period from 1916 to 1925 was Anderson's richest.
Some of his finest stories were collected in The Triumph of the Egg (1921), including "I Want to Know Why" and the sadly comic "The Egg, " and in Horses and Men (1923), including "The Man Who Became a Woman. " Many of these tales and the minor novel Many Marriages (1923) manifested his dislike of sexual repression and middle-class conventionality, his opposition to business success and a machine civilization, and his conviction, reflected in his narrative technique, that life is essentially a series of intensely felt moments.
A Story Teller's Story (1924), a fanciful autobiography, memorably described his life as representative of the artist in America. This period closed with Dark Laughter (1925), another study of walled-in personalities and his only financially successful novel. Anderson was highly regarded by writers like Dreiser and Hart Crane.
A growing critical recognition was marked by his receiving in 1921 the first Dial award for his contribution to American writing. In the spring and summer of 1921 Paul Rosenfeld paid Anderson's and his wife's expenses to France and England. Anderson was delighted with Paris and with meeting James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Reading Gertrude Stein's work had, he felt, released a poetic second self within him--though equally important literary influences had been Turgenev, the English novelist George Borrow, George Moore, Mark Twain, and the King James Bible.
Just as he had encouraged Ernest Hemingway during their brief acquaintance in Chicago in 1921, so now he befriended William Faulkner and encouraged him to write about his own Mississippi county. Disliking the heat of New Orleans, the Andersons purchased a farm in the Virginia mountains near Marion and in the summer of 1926 built there a fieldstone house, "Ripshin, " which was to be Anderson's usual summer residence for the rest of his life. Horace Liveright, publisher of Dark Laughter, was now paying Anderson $100 a week in return for one publishable volume a year. Under pressure to produce and in conflict with his gentle, more conventional third wife, he found writing difficult. Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (1926), a collection of previously published sketches and articles; Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926); and A New Testament (1927) were of poor quality, and his stature among fellow writers was declining.
Anderson's brief second trip to Paris in the winter of 1926-1927 was marred by his illness and recurring depression. Having canceled his financial arrangement with Liveright, he found a patron in Burton Emmett, a wealthy advertising executive, and, subsequently, in Emmett's widow, who helped support Anderson well into the 1930s.
In November 1927, with funds from Emmett, he bought two weekly Marion newspapers and began a country editor's life. Selections from his newspaper writings did make up Hello Towns! (1929); yet his depression soon returned.
After Elizabeth left him late in 1928, he turned the newspapers over to his son Robert early in 1929 and began reporting on the life of Southern mill workers. His articles on the defeat of men, but not of women, by the Machine Age were collected in Perhaps Women (1931), and he finally completed an uneven novel, Beyond Desire (1932), partly based on the Southern textile strikes of 1929-1930. This new interest in Southern working conditions was encouraged by Eleanor Gladys Copenhaver, a Marion girl nearly twenty years his junior who was industrial secretary of the national Y. W. C. A.
Anderson had attended a World's Congress against War in Amsterdam in August 1932, and through the 1930's he occasionally supported left-wing causes.
A final excellent collection of stories, Death in the Woods (1933), sold few copies because of Liveright's bankruptcy. To support himself, Anderson traveled about the United States as a journalist during the mid-1930s sensitively observing depression life; his articles written at this time were collected in Puzzled America (1935). No Swank (1934) brought together sketches of acquaintances; and his last novel, Kit Brandon (1936), told the story of a Southern mountain girl turned bootlegger. Dramatic versions of his tales were printed in Plays: Winesburg and Others (1937). Despite continued wanderings and occasional appearances at writers' conferences, he maintained his roots in Marion, and he celebrated small-town life in the sketches of Home Town (1940).
While preparing his autobiography, published posthumously as Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942), Anderson embarked on an unofficial goodwill tour of South America with his wife. Sailing from New York in late February 1941, he fell ill when a piece of toothpick he had swallowed at a farewell party perforated his intestine. He was taken ashore in the Panama Canal Zone and underwent surgery at the Colón (Panama) Hospital, but died there of an intestinal obstruction and peritonitis at the age of sixty-four. His body was returned to Marion, Virginia, for burial in Round Hill Cemetery.
(Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bi...)
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Religion
Although his mother and sister were Presbyterians, he had little interest in formal religion.
Politics
Anderson was briefly attracted to Communism and occasionally supported left-wing causes. His admiration for Communist opposition to socioeconomic injustice was offset by his skepticism toward all ideologies and his gift for intuitive understanding of individuals.
Connections
On May 16, 1904, he married Cornelia Pratt Lane, the cultivated daughter of a Toledo businessman. They had three children: Robert Lane, John Sherwood, and a daughter, Marion.
Anderson's first marriage had ended in divorce on July 27, 1916, and on July 31, at Chateaugay, New York, he married Tennessee Claflin Mitchell, a music teacher widely acquainted in Chicago's artistic bohemia. Soon these two independent temperaments began clashing.
In 1922 he left his second wife and lived first in New Orleans and then in New York City, where he met Elizabeth Norman Prall, manager of a bookstore. Early in 1923 he began residence in Reno, Nevada; and on April 4, 1924, he divorced Tennessee, marrying Elizabeth Prall in Martinez, California, the following day and shortly thereafter returning to New Orleans with her.
Elizabeth left him late in 1928 (Anderson was to divorce her in February 1932).
On July 6, 1933 Anderson married Eleanor Gladys Copenhaver.